Splinters by Steinigans

Splinters follows a bill collector's misadventures with a scrappy dog and its owner. Across six panels, Steinigans employs the visual vocabulary that defined early newspaper comics: regular panel grid, speech balloons advancing narrative, and a recurring protagonist whose exaggerated features drive the humor. The strip's economy of line and reliance on slapstick—the collector repeatedly humiliated by a small dog—typifies the Sunday supplement humor that emerged in the 1890s. Newspaper comics of this era established the formal grammar later adopted by the comic book: sequential art that told stories through image and text in concert, reaching millions of daily readers and spawning the medium's conventions of characterization, pacing, and visual gag construction.